Poem

On Monday nights since September we've been running a reading club at our house. There are eight of us but sometimes the number in attendance slips a few. There are just two men in the group - myself and John McAleer. He's a former colleague of mine at UUJ and a very bright man. Anyway, a couple of months ago I suggested that we might round off our book discussion each evening with a favourite poem that each of us would bring along. So John's wife Bridget mentioned that John wrote poetry, and he agreed to bring a poem in and read it last Monday. It's called 'Jude's Circle' but that's just the poem's jumping-off point. I like it a lot: it's very thoughtful, just like its creator.

JUDE’S CIRCLE

Green glass batteries splashing acid from their noses
Carried in wire frames slung from handlebars
Fetched home from charger’s shop
To coax the radio to life.
What alchemy is this plucking voices from the silence?

It was done before in stone circles set to measure sun and moon
To name the silence and master the emptiness of time.
The words embrace the dumb dead things and make them shine.
The world is named, recast and named again.
We circle its resistant crust and prise a gap
To take possession of everything that is, with words.
When shelter food and sleep are done we turn to play,
Spraying paint from berry-reddened lips to splayed hand, or
Measuring the gate of antelope and bison across cave wall.
Now the ping of radiated sound flung far to starlit space,
The Hubble searching for our match beyond the rim.
All restless play to fill the void and leave no space unfilled.

We circle here as done before to dwell upon the words.

Core Things

I remember an occasion over thirty years ago, in Newcastle upon Tyne, saying to the man I was drinking with that I figured all the things we do, including great art, are to help us forget that inside fifty, a hundred years we'll be no more than a handful of dust. He seemed to find this funny (admittedly we'd both been drinking for quite some time) but he didn't explain what aspect of it he found funny.

I found myself thinking of this over the past week. My wife's sister Phil had been rushed to hospital and had been diagnosed as having a tumour on her brain and underwent surgery in Dublin. As we waited for news and prayed, all the normal things that interest me - books, music, sport, ideas - all slipped away and became the feeble props I'd identified them as being in that boozing session so long ago. And then, with the surgery completed and the word that my sister-in-law was looking pretty wretched, when we were bracing ourselves for the worst, word came. The tumour was benign and she was going home the next day. Again, everything else became meaningless, peripheral, but instead of a core of fear we were focused on a core of joy. As Woody Allen said once: "The two most beautiful words in the English language: it's benign".

Stand and deliver. Then fly/drive

I'm getting ready to run a half-marathon (no, please, please - you'll frighten the horses with your applause) in Bantry at the beginning of next month. There are a lot of interesting aspects to doing this, including the recurring thought "Am I mad/stupid/consumed by a death-wish?", but the one that struck me today was the way institutions - more specifically places - like to rip you off. My last encounter with this was a few years back, when we were leaving Vancouver airport. We'd bitten deep into the bank balance, as usually is the case with holidays, and were about to leave this good-looking airport, when so help me, a pleasant airport official put a gun to my head and told me to give him around fifty quid. In Canadian dollars. OK, he didn't actually use a gun but he made it clear that if we didn't fork out this extra sum, we just weren't going to get leaving his nice airport. Something to do with an airport tax and the need to keep this lovely airport looking lovely or even lovelier. We had to pay, of course. No choice. Sprung on us at the last minute when there wasn't any possible way of going back. So today, after much online meandering, I finally located a reasonably-priced car for rental. I couldn't get a car to rent in Cork city, which struck me as a bit odd. All the car rentals are located at Cork airport, about five or six miles outside the city. So what the hell, I thought - I'll get out there, I'll book it. So I did, online. And when I had given my credit card details and all the rest, swounds, I look and see a little note that says 'A standard airport surchange of €28 will be added to the cost when you pick up your car from Cork Airport'. That's the equivalent of an extra day's rental cost. So should I cancel my booking? No point, except I want to opt for a bicycle during my time down there, where I'm confidently told the scenery is simply yummy. So now I know why they've located all the car rentals out at the airport. Not to convenience the flight passengers (which I'm not) but to take money out of their pockets and the pockets of others who're left with no choice. A small Irish gun or a slightly bigger Canadian gun - take your pick.

Viva Dick!

The aptly-named Dick Roche was on television yesterday. Dick is a well-padded man, an Irish cabinet minister and he was talking about a young Irishman who’d been shot dead in Bolivia. The authorities there say the young man was part of a group intent on assassinating the country’s president, Evo Morales. Dick in contrast said that there was no evidence the young man was engaged in illegal activities, and that he Dick was full of sympathy for the young man and his family.

Well good man Dick. For a young man to lose his life is saddening, and the sadness is somehow deepened by the fact that the sad events occurred so far away from home. Which makes it doubly cheering that a politician so elevated can empathise with ordinary people, especially when misfortune strikes in a foreign land.

And it is of course a blow for justice and human rights everywhere that Dick has insisted we must presume the young man innocent until or if he is proved guilty. That’s the cornerstone of any respectable justice system. Dick had another opportunity to speak out under similar circumstances in Latin America a few years ago. Three Irishmen were arrested and charged with helping FARC guerrillas in their campaign against the government. There was no evidence of any kind that the men had done what they were charged– in fact the testimony of some witnesses for the prosecution were shown to be poorly-constructed lies, contradicted by the facts. Unfortunately Dick must have been on his holidays or maybe nodded off during the months of the men’s incarceration and trial. There are some suspicious-minded people who think that because the men had links with Sinn Fein, that may have affected Dick’s notable silence as well as the cries of ‘They’re guilty as hell and deserve what’s coming to them!’ that came from his colleagues in Fianna Fail and much of the Irish media.

Inconsistency: that’s what makes so many Irish politicians a delight to observe. Sure if well-padded men like Dick reacted in the same way to every Irishman abroad who was killed or imprisoned, life would be very dull.

Older and Bolder

I spent yesterday talking to four people, three of whom I had last seen when they and I were seventeen years old. I'm doing a series of interviews with people (I almost said 'boys') who left St Columb's College, Derry (yes, that's right - the only school in the world to have produced two Nobel Prize winners - John Hume and Seamus Heaney) in 1960. The idea is to have the interviews completed by next year, the fiftieth anniversary and maybe squeeze a publication out of it.

It's sobering, seeing people age fifty years overnight, as it were. I was struck by the frailty of the flesh with the first two men - one had a serious heart condition, the other had a stomach problem that he was having tests run on. The second two, whom I interviewed together - one had a serious heart condition, the other was healthy enough but had lost all his hair, once thick and ginger. So I'm sitting there interviewing the second two, looking from one to the other, when I happen to raise my eyes and look into a mirror behind them. Switch the temperature from chilling to blood-freezing: I'm looking at a scrawny old bugger with no hair worth talking about, a neck that looks like it's made of slack strings of flesh and a smile that shows terrifying teeth-gaps.

And yet I can't rid myself of the thought that we're all only pretending to be grown-up, senior, grandfathers and sages. Inside, we haven't a clue about hardly anything and if we had a chance, we'd opt for having a laugh and maybe getting pissed, preferably in the company of a handful (OK, a group) of gorgeous and admiring girls, rather than exploring the meaning of life or facing the awful prospect that inside twenty years, if we're lucky, we'll all be looking at the world from a six-foot-under perspective. In the meantime, though, a resolution: the next shop assistant who asks me to put my 'WEE credit card' into the paying thingy and calls me 'love/pet' is going to get a fist in the face.

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Dumb Irish

This is my first blog and I don’t even know if I should dip my toe in the bloggy waters, but a cartoon in The Irish Times the other day gave me such a pain in the bum, I need to vent my spleen somewhere. It showed a great oafish balaclava-ed figure peeling an Elastoplast strip from his arm, with underneath ‘Real’ and under that ‘Continuity’ and under that ‘Provisional’, all having the common ‘IRA’ as their noun. The little funny figure beside the oaf is saying: “That’s awful. These pointless mindless murders aren’t the same as the Provos’ mindless murders’.

It’s so typical of The Irish Times, which sets its face against all republican violence but has a soft spot for the violence of the First World War, particularly that involving British regiments and especially particularly British regiments in which Irishmen fought.

Of course all war is hell. Of course the taking of a single life is a kind of blasphemy, dousing a unique flame that God went to the bother of creating. But the selective condemnation of violence - Provo violence bad, British regiment violence noble - suggests that those who produce this kind of line are either unable to see the lack of logic in their position, or able to see the lack of logic but assume the rest of us are so stupid, we won’t. If The Irish Times made the same effort to understand the position of nationalists and republicans in the North as they do to understand the position of unionists, progress towards reconciliation and grown-up politics would be a lot more brisk.